Talk:Hawkins Electrical Guide

Pet Project Page
This page is a pet project of mine, and I will likely be working on this for months to come. Please add to it, if you have access to the same text. Images are scanned at 600 dpi in 8-bit grayscale, touched up a little to remove dust and printing smudges, and converted to pure black and white by using the Adjust Levels function of the freeware Gimp software.

If you take a look at my Talk page you'll see that I think Wikipedia desperately needs more illustrations, and I've worked to create a bunch of my own handmade images for articles. However, this takes a major amount of work, and so if we can legally use expired copyright content in Wikipedia then it seems much easier to use what is already available through old technical books such as this.

I bought this nine-volume set on ebay for US$100, with the primary intent of scanning the images and using them in various technical articles. The extremely high quality illustrative content of the Hawkins Electrical Guide is of considerable value to the Wikipedia project since this work can be used in so many different articles. DMahalko (talk) 07:16, 12 February 2008 (UTC)

Nice. I have a copy of the entire set, too [bought it a half-price books]. Excellent series of books. If I can help, tell me. J. D. Redding 16:12, 21 July 2009 (UTC)

How to deal with the massive public domain content?
I've started to add page and illustration numbers, and if you look at how they compare, there are nearly double as many illustrations as pages. This article documenting illustration use on Wikipedia may eventually have to be split into sub-articles by book chapter. DMahalko (talk) 07:16, 12 February 2008 (UTC)

Moving images to the Wikimedia Commons
I wasn't thinking about usage on the Commons at first but I'm probably going to be uploading direct to the commons after this, so that these technical images can be directly used with other languages. Perhaps this whole article should be duplicated in the Commons as well? I'm new to dealing with the Commons.. DMahalko (talk) 07:16, 12 February 2008 (UTC)

Commons would allow greater access, but I find searching there rather cumbersome. Please post the category you use for the images. J. D. Redding 16:14, 21 July 2009 (UTC)